The Dharma, sutras, and commentarial interpretations of interest to American Buddhists of all traditions with news that not only informs but transforms. Emphasis on meditation, enlightenment, karma, social evolution, and nonharming.
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Ouija board users report that the planchette (on left) moves on its own. Scientists try to differ.
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Ouija boards: Science explains the spooky sensation
People are stupid. Science tells us so with math.
New research reveals all the psychological mechanisms that are responsible for creating the “paranormal” sensation that Ouija boards often induce.
Since its invention in the late 19th century, the Ouija board has become a hallmark of popular culture [and dabbling in unseen entities, evil, the supernatural, haunting poltergeists, the world of the dead, the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, and "unclean spirits" or malevolent unseen beings].
Ouija board sessions lead to troubles
(Speech Problem Chills w/ Merch, 4/5/18) 12 Scariest Ouija Board Videos YouTubers Caught on Tape
A decorated planchette conjures images of scared kids staying up late, Halloween horror movies, or TV shows old and new, such as Charmed and Stranger Things.
Ouija boards may have “haunted” most of our childhoods, but some people are Ouija enthusiasts well into their adulthood — and understandably so.
The appeal of a device that supposedly helps one communicate with the dead is undeniable. [A safer and better way to contact the deceased, particularly lost loved ones, is the Ancient Greek Psychomantium.]
However, what if there were a simple scientific explanation for why Ouija boards work [that did not include the activity of deceptive unseen beings moving the planchette]?
Researchers led by Marc Andersen at Aarhus University in Denmark set out to demystify the Ouija board experience.
Using eye-tracking devices and data analysis, Prof. Andersen and colleagues examined the behavior of 40 experienced Ouija board users at a Ouija board conference.
The scientists’ findings were published in the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
Using eye trackers to study “spooky” feelings
The participants were equipped with eye tracking devices so that the researchers could study their — largely unconscious — predictive eye movements.
That is, the researchers wanted to see if the participants first glanced at the letters they would later move the planchette to.
As the scientists explain, a person’s sense of agency, or the feeling that one has control over his or her actions, arises primarily from the brain’s ability to predict “the sensory consequences of an action, and then [compare] this prediction [with] the actual consequences.
“When prediction and consequence match, the result is the feeling that ‘I did that.’” More
[What do Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Buddhist Lama Surya Das, Apple iPhone's Steve Jobs, Google founder Larry Page, Ebay's founder Jeffrey Skoll, Daniel Goleman, Ram Dass, and Julia Roberts have in common? They all followed this "godman."]
Is a devotee who promised to serve a guru able to assert her defiance or her consent?
Yet another example of a Hindu guru sexually abusing one of his devotees:
The story was a devotee’s account of her sexual and violent interactions withNeem Karoli Baba, famed guru to the stars of the Americancounterculture.
But this recently circulated version omitted sections of the original narrative, critical segments that complicate a facile black-and-white story of abuse and productively introduce the idea of “gray rape.”
Gray rape acknowledges the messiness of sexual interactions, the competing discourses of normal sex (by which we establish what constitutes sexual violation), and differences in power and positionality that disallow a priorinotions of consent.
Sound and photos of Baba and devotees
(Nit Ram, 7/18) What did this love-magnet, love-emanating sex guru look and sound like back then?
The great guru was once handsome.
In what follows, I [Amanda Lucas] aim to illustrate the impossibility of a universal standard of consent that can be dislocated from the social context in which it is enacted and the power relations that inform it.
To do so, I first introduce the redacted account that recently circulated on social media and that generated outrage. Second, I add the omitted sections from this account and show how they produce a more complex narrative, dependent on the values and perspectives of the people involved.
This version leads us into the muddy waters of real human interactions, ones that are fraught and complex, contradictory and unclear.
In this particular case, the devotee recounting the story is anonymous and the guru in question is dead. What can we know of their actions and intentions, or how coercion and consent overlapped and intertwined?
This is all the more important when the narrative is located within the social context of the Hindu guru-disciple relationship, a relationship entirely dependent on unequal power relations, wherein the guru is respected as a spiritual master and it is the disciple’s duty to submit to his authority.
Here is the recently circulated version that appeared on social media and that was previously published in the exposé volume, Stripping the Gurus:
The first time he [Guru Neem Karoli Baba] took me in the room alone I sat up on the tucket [low wooden bed] with him, and he was like a seventeen-year-old jock who was a little fast! I felt as if I were fifteen and innocent.
He started making out with me, and it was so cute, so pure. I was swept into it for a few moments — then grew alarmed: “Wait! This is my guru. One doesn’t do this [have sex] with one’s guru!” So I pulled away from him.
Then Maharajji ["Great Revered King" Neem Karoli Baba] tilted his head sideways and wrinkled up his eyebrows in a tender, endearing, quizzical look. He didn’t say anything, but his whole being was saying to me, “Don’t you like me?”
You did what with your who!? - Wait, come back!
But as soon as I walked out of that particular darshan [the ritual act of seeing/being seen by the divine guru], I started getting so sick that by the end of the day I felt I had vomited and shit out everything that was ever inside me.
I had to be carried out of the ashram [religious hermitage]. On the way, we stopped by Maharajji’s [Neem Karoli Baba’s] room so I could pranam [prostrate] to him.
I kneeled by the tucket and put my head down by his feet — and he kicked me in the head, saying, “Get her out of here!” . . .
***
That was the first time, and I was to be there for two years. During my last month there, I was alone with him every day in the room . . . Sometimes he would just touch me on the breasts and between my legs, saying, “This is mine, this is mine, this is mine. All is mine. You are mine.”
You can interpret it as you want, but near the end in these darshans, it was as though he were my child. Sometimes I felt as though I were suckling a tiny baby.
***
In many ways Neem Karoli Baba was a humble guru with simple teachings, but he became internationally renowned because of his disciples’ fame.
He cultivated a cherished devotional space in the late 1960s and 1970s at his ashram in the Himalayan foothill town of Nanital, India, which Parvati Markus chronicled in her book Love Everyone.
Neem Karoli Baba’s story often begins with the litany of Western devotees who became highly influential people after their encounters with him. Ram Dass [Harvard Dr. Richard Alpert, author of Be Here Now] and Bhagavan Das [Kermit Michael Riggs] became his disciples and, later, gurus in their own right.
Ram Dass inspired a generation with his pathbreaking publication Be Here Now.
Steve Jobs?! The Apple iPhone guy?!
In 1973, billionaire financier Robert Friedland met Neem Karoli Baba and was so impressed with the simple, giggling guru that he told his friend [Apple Computer's] Steve Jobs to go to India to meet him.
Jobs went to see the guru and, as recounted in his biography, said, “For me it was a serious search. I’d been turned on to the idea of enlightenment and trying to figure out who I was and how I fit into things.”
Zuckerberg's Facebook helps CIA, FBI, NSA...
Forty years later, when Jobs met another tech-entrepreneur experiencing difficult times, he suggested that he, too, should travel to the guru's ashram in India. Mark Zuckerberg followed his advice.
“He [Jobs] told me that in order to reconnect with what I believed as the mission of the company, I should visit this temple that he had gone to in India early on in his evolution of thinking about what he wanted Apple and his vision of the future to be.”
Not Google, too! Who is this monster?
He explains that his month-long trip to India “reinforced for me the importance of what we were doing.”
Google’s founder Larry Page visited Neem Karoli Baba, as did:
[In 2020, Guru Jeffrey Miller, aka "Lama Surya Das," told a reporter that he had slept with "probably one or two" [Joshua Eaton, July 30, 2020, "Buddhist teacher Lama Surya Das admits sleeping with adult students in past, saysit was wrong," Religion News Service] of his students but that they had seduced him by plying him with alcohol and surprising him in his bed.
Later, in a statement released by a spokesperson, he said that he had had intimate relationships with "a few" (Ibid.) of his former students before 2010 (Ibid.) These admissions came after five women, working through a lawyer, brought allegations of sexual misconduct by Lama Surya Das to Dzogchen Foundation's board of directors in 2019.
Three of them said Lama Surya Das suggested that meditating while naked in his lap would help their spiritual practice. Two others recounted sexual encounters with Lama Surya Das, including one who said that he told her sleeping with him would complete her Buddhist training (Ibid.)
Lama Surya Das has disputed some of the details of these sex abuse allegations (Ibid.)
Ma Jaya, the guru and AIDS activist, revered Neem Karoli Baba, and leading kīrtan musicians Jai Uttal and Krishna Dass have been publicly vocal about their devotion to Baba.
Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman
After seeing a photo of Neem Karoli Baba, Hollywood actress Julia Roberts began to practice Hinduism and has expressed reverence for the smiling guru of the Himalayan foothills.
The [abused] devotee’s account that opened this discussion was not hidden from these [celebrity] celebrants of the guru.
On the cover, the lovesex guru, clad in his signature plaid woolen blanket, holds a tulip, his eyes cast to the side in peaceful reflection.
When the book was published, the passage did not spark any significant critique of Neem Karoli Baba’s [sexually exploitative] treatment of this female devotee.
It also included several key sections that add to the complexity and ambiguity of the account. The deleted sections that did not appear in the recent story on social media are as follows:
…I was unable to move for the next three days, but after that I felt perfectly well again. And I had worked through a lot of my reactions to that darshan: revulsion, confusion, and so forth…
...Even as early as the 1960s, there were rumors about Neem Karoli Baba’s sexual relationships with women.
Ram Dass (Dr. Dick Alpert) introduces the special "favor" their guru showed women by positioning Neem Karoli Baba as emblematic of [the Hindu god] Krishna [to make it all right]. More
Believe it or not, statistics show that 70% of lottery winners end up broke, and a third go on to declare bankruptcy, according to America's National Endowment for Financial Education.
Runaway spending, toxic investments, and poor accounting can burn through a lucrative windfall in next to no time. From rags to riches then back to rags again is a sad ride. Read on to see the unlucky lottery winners who found out the hard way. More
Andrew Jackson Whittaker winnings: $113 million. In 2002, construction boss Andrew Jackson Whittaker won a whopping $314.9 million on the Powerball multi-state lottery and opted for a lump sum payout of $113 million. Plagued by bad luck...all the money had gone and Whittaker was back to square one. Source
16 of the scariest (and creepiest) child villains in the history of film. Is Regan still No. 1?
The History of Halloween
(BuzzFeed Unsolved Network, Oct. 18, 2020)
We dive into the spooky and surprising history of one of America's favorite (and most profit-generating) holidays, Samhain, secular All Hallows Eve or All Saints Day, which we call Halloween.
But he’s not Jesus. Shockingly, an ancient stone tablet that has emerged from the Jordanian antiquities market seems to suggest that there was a dying and resurrecting Messiah before Jesus.
Secrets of Christianity brings the techniques of investigative journalism to history, with Simcha Jacobovici connecting the dots of many academic and scientific disciplines to present a new take on the past.
The series uncovers alternate truths that have either eluded us or purposely been kept from us – until now.
It's like Netflix for history... Sign up to History Hit, the world's best history documentary service and get 50% off using the code 'Parable' (bit.ly/3e2c2Xs). Subscribe to Parable for more religious history documentaries.
Content licensed from Syndicado. Any queries, please contact: owned-enquiries@littledotstudios.com
#Parable #Messiah #JesusChrist
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Wisdom Quarterly brand vegan, gluten-free hair support formula you can make at home.
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Can't wait till it's long enough to cut!
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MSN is showing the photos in honor of Roberts' 54th birthday. Look at that smile! Listen to that laugh! Good grief.
My sugar daddy's a prince! And I'm
Who can forget her in Pretty Woman alongside Buddhist Richard Gere, at one time the most desirable man in Hollywood?
Julia Roberts' warm brown eyes sparkled when she wore her hair in a dark brunette shade during the 1998 BAFTA Awards in London.
What is it about her that so enchants the American public and most of the movie-going world? When Disney put out a feelgood story about a happy prostitute, Pretty Woman, the world couldn't get enough of her.
Julia Roberts, 1998 BAFTA Awards
We love fairytales. "Originally intended to be a dark cautionary tale about class and prostitution in Los Angeles, the film was re-conceived as a romantic comedy with a large budget," according to Wikipedia.
It was widely successful at the box office and was the third-highest-grossing film of 1990. It had the highest ticket sales in the US ever for a romcom, with Box Office Mojo listing it as the No. 1 romantic comedy by the highest estimated domestic tickets sold... More
What is Vajrayana Buddhist Richard Gere up to nowadays? Last heard, in early April 2018, Gere married Spanish activist Alejandra Silva.
In August 2018, they announced that they were expecting their first child.
Then their son, Alexander, was born in February of 2019. In April 2020, when Gere was 71, the birth of their second son was reported.
Richard Gere is now 72 (12/17)
Gere's interest in Buddhism began when he was in his 20s. He first studied Zen Buddhism under Kyozan Joshu Sasaki. After having studied Zen for five or six years, in 1978 he and Brazilian painter Sylvia Martins traveled to Nepal, where he met many Tibetan monks and higher lamas.
Gere then met the 14th Dalai Lama in India, a kind of pope-king, and became a practicing Tibetan Buddhist of the Gelugpa school and an active supporter of his. More
(NBC News, Oct. 31, 2021) Watch live coverage as demented President Joe Biden delivers remarks at the G-20 summit.
Will the capitalists get their way and finally be able to profit nonstop from global climate change alarmism? Let's clean the environment, let's stop contaminating it by corporate irresponsibility, let's stop believing the lie that carbon (which is what plants thrive on) is bad.
Alec Baldwin speaks up after killing Halyna Hutchins on the movie set of Rust
(SNL/NBC News, Oct. 30, 2021) Actor Alec Baldwin, with his fake-Latin wife "Hilaria" whom he has to shoo away -- spoke out on camera for the first time after firing the shot on the Rust movie set where he tragically shot cinematographer Halyna Hutchins to death. Baldwin said he couldn’t make any comments because of the ongoing investigation but defended the production and called it a "well-oiled crew."
Alec Baldwin, 63, breaks silence after Rust shooting incident
(Fox News, Oct. 30, 2021)
Panel weighs in on developments in the fatal movie set shooting on Fox News' The Big Saturday Show. [Negligence? An Illuminati takedown of an Illuminati Hollywood bigshot making fun of failed Pres. Trump? How long before Tom Hanks gets taken down?]
PurgatoryMovie.com; Crystal Quintero, CC Liu, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
Purgatory the movie: trailer and review
(Uniquely Mary, Oct. 26, 2021)
This week only check out the official trailer and movie review. Be inspired. Learn more. Understand things you never knew about purgatory.
The movie seems to be saying that it is not, in fact, "God" who orders rebirth in heaven, hells, purgatory, the human world, or any of the other planes of existence.
It is, instead, as the Buddha said, one's own deeds (karma) -- merit, "sin," intentional conduct, courses of action. As we sow, so we reap. We plant seeds of action, and they ripen into results (vipaka and phala).
How can we, the living on earth, help those who have been reborn in lower (subhuman) worlds, like the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (preta loka)?
There is the transfer of merit -- doing a good thing here in their honor that they may rejoice and thereby make good mental karma they otherwise do not have the opportunity to make in that world.
This human plane is a very fortunate place to be reborn, in that it is an in-between station between the many, many celestial worlds superior to it and not nearly so grim and difficult to endure as the many lower planes called the Downfall (niraya) and lowest worlds or naraka.
In later Buddhism, which is very Catholic and Hindu in its orientation, worship of Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva became popular. This figure represents a "savior entity" (bodhisattva), who has vowed to "rescue all beings from hell" (i.e., purgatory, as no world no matter how low or how long the lifespan there is truly "eternal").
He is Kṣitigarbha, the "guardian of souls" who have died before their parents.
The worship of a Mother Goddess figure, like beautiful Mother Mary in Catholicism, is also greater than concern or interest in the historical Buddha. She is Kwan Yin Bodhisattva, the Goddess of Compassion to countless people, primarily Chinese, a billion of whom are uncounted Buddhists.
In fact, in Mahayana Buddhism, the worship of Amitabha "Buddha" is most popular, paralleling Catholic and Christian obsession with the "Son of God" (devaputra) rather than God.
‘Several big developments’ in COVID-19 origins investigation
(Sky News Australia, Oct. 31, 2021)
Sky News Host Sharri Markson says there have been “several big developments” in investigations into the origins of the COVID-19 virus.
“The full details of the intelligence community's report into the origins of Covid-19 [were] released this weekend,” Markson said.
“Scott Morrison, over at the G-20, has reiterated his call for an investigation into how the pandemic started.
“There have been several big developments; proposals about the risky research the Wuhan Institute of Virology was intending to conduct have been made public.
“And an admission from the NIH…that it was funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan.” Markson discussed the issue with Gary Ruskin of the US Right to Know Group.
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